In Bed

so much happens, most of it unseen

On Sunday Joab and I went to the labour ward, not because I was in labour, but because I hadn’t felt the baby move at all during the previous night. By morning, I was really missing the kicks, wriggles and hiccups.

Lying on the examination bed in a small room, waiting for one of the midwives to assess me, the baby kicked. Hard. 

Yes! I said, looking over at Joab. When the midwife came into the room and we told her the news she smiled, telling us that Joab and I had still done the right thing to come into hospital. After listening to baby’s heartbeat and taking my blood pressure, we were sent on our way. I cried in the lift out of sheer relief that everything was fine.

During that anxious morning, I’d worried I’d been too laissez-faire about being pregnant – perhaps I should have been more humble. Perhaps I’d mistakenly believed that, at 24 weeks pregnant, I was in the safe zone.

We walked from the hospital to a nearby cafe and ordered fat, glazed pastries. My life is mostly cakes, puddings and bakeries right now, but that pain au raisin tasted better than any other of the past few weeks. After believing that bad news was coming, and then being told that things were fine, everything felt doubly delicious.

Sadly, the US election didn’t feel that way. I work exclusively with Americans, and their sadness and disappointment has been palpable, even over Teams meetings. Yesterday, I needed to leave the gloom, and my bedroom, and my desk, and go further than my local park.  In my lunchbreak I headed to Tracey Emin’s show, I Followed You to the End, at the White Cube Gallery. 

What I was most struck by was the setting for the paintings. Emin’s bedroom, her bed. I never did go and see the instillation she’s most famous for: My Bed. But the many paintings in this exhibition showed Emin in bed, depicted in navy blues and reds and blacks and washed out pinks. Sometimes the paint had dried in dripping lines, less soothing than waterfall patterns, more like prison bars. Without knowing that Emin has been very unwell, you could guess, from looking, that she has been in agony for a lot of the past few years. 

What I saw: Emin in bed, mostly on her own, her whole body above the sheets, sometimes spurting blood; sometimes entangled tenderly with another body, a pointed foot here, an elegant limb there, buoyant breasts, reminding me that bodies can be a source of pain, but also, they can be very beautiful. I especially liked that often, the paintings featured one of Emin’s beloved cats lying next to her, or sitting protectively on a nearby chest of drawers. I searched for the titles. More Dreaming. More Fucking. Why Was I Crying. And We Slept. Barbed Wire Stitches. All of these words and pictures of a particular moment, of a particular feeling, of a unique love, joy, or pain.

Flames of Love

Sometimes, someone captures a whole life, a whole feeling, in one particular environment. What particularly moved me was the fact that Emin had managed to create the story of a significant period of her life in one setting. 

I can’t compare much of my life with Emin’s. I have not been seriously ill, not in these past years (or ever). But I could relate so hard to being in bed for much of life’s significant moments.

My bed is at the very top of my house. I didn’t always spend as much time in it as I do now. I usually sprang to life at 6.30am or before, preferring to be at the kitchen table, with a coffee, and some peace and quiet before the kids woke up. 

And then, almost a decade ago, for almost two years, my eldest daughter went away to live in residential care because she was not at all well. It was a truly terrible time. I was a grieving mother, who had, in many ways, failed as a parent. I wondered whether my eldest child would actually make it through the whole ordeal – whether any of us would.

My daughter was a grieving adolescent, missing home, missing her family, missing the freedom that other people of her age had. And that’s when, I think, I started to retreat to my bed. At any given opportunity, when my other children or work didn’t need me, I would go to my bed and hide. The idea of my bed was comforting, but in it, I’m not sure how comforted I felt. At least I could pretend that up there, under the covers, I was protecting other people from my misery.

I have written about that time in over 70,000 words in the past 8 years, but I don’t like many of the words. Some things work, and some things don’t.

Eventually, my daughter did come home. The best possible outcome we could have hoped for. I will never not be grateful that things did get better, because there was no real guarantee that they would. But there was an extended hangover of sadness and grief after that time.

My daughter and I don’t talk about it that much, perhaps because, even after many years, the pain still sits on the surface of our existence. And also because our experiences are so unique: what was true for me was different for my daughter. We are learning to deal with our feelings from that time at our own tempo, in the ways that feel right for us. All I know is that we have concentrated hard on love. We have loved each fiercely, freely, without resistance.

Now I stay in bed for different reasons. Because it is warm. Because it allows me to keep my legs elevated (my ankles are no longer my ankles).  It is where I get to feel the baby move, because I’m usually very still. It’s where I drink the coffee that Joab brings me in the morning. It is where I do most of my crying, laughing, and online food shopping.

Like many others, I’m so glad that Tracey Emin’s work exists. I’m sure she often doubted whether she could make the work for her latest show at all (and all in a year! All THIS year), in the midst of the exhaustion and recovery from cancer and major surgery. She commented recently that when she had a show on, “Everything is outside. My emotions are on show… my feelings are raw.” And that sometimes, she gets a bit sick of herself. 

I don’t think I could ever get sick of Tracey Emin. Right now, I’m lying in bed. The cat seems to be with me at all times. He does everything except eat here, and I doubt he feels guilty about it. Perhaps he looks at me in the same way and thinks: you never leave, do you?

My daughter chose the name Tommy for our cat

How do you feel about your bed? What do you do there (that you’re happy to share)?